The Naturalist's Corner

The Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency (TWRA) announced in mid-February that two bats from Worley’s cave had tested positive for White Nose Syndrome (WNS).

The cave, officially designated Morrell Cave by the U.S. Board on Geographical Names in 1980 but more commonly known as Worley’s or Morril’s cave, is located just southeast of Bluff City, Tenn., only about an hour and a half from Asheville.

Two tri-colored bats (formerly eastern pipistrelle) tested positive for the fungus (Geomyces destructans). While scientists are still not one hundred percent sure that the fungus is the sole causative agent, bat-to-bat-transmission of the fungus has been observed.

Whatever the cause, the malaise is clearly catastrophic. Mortality in some affected hibernacula has exceeded 90 percent. It is estimated that somewhere between one-half million and one million bats have succumbed to WNS, including at least 25,000 endangered Indiana bats.

Tennessee joins New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts, West Virginia and Virginia to become the tenth state to document WNS. Worley’s cave is the most southern and most western site, to date, where WNS has been recorded. The cave is only about 65 miles from known infected sites in Virginia.

But the prospect of further western and/or southern spread is a scary prospect for biologists and bat fanciers. Tennessee may have more caves than any state in the nation and a single cave in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is a hibernaculum for nearly nine percent of the total estimated population of endangered Indiana bats.

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And now for things that make you go hmmmmm....

You and I and all the taxpayers across this great land have paid about $14 million for ivory-billed woodpecker conservation since 2005. Never mind the fact that not one ivory-billed woodpecker has been conclusively documented since the late 1930s early 1940s.

Bat researchers are overjoyed that the Obama administration has secured $1.9 million in funding for the study of WNS. Maybe if we glued feathers to their wings and took fuzzy videos, we could get some dollars to study this devastating disease.

Wait a minute! That would be forethought — what am I thinking?

Don Hendershot can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.